“Right,” Alan said. “I was just thinking of that. What could be more democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?”
“Yeah,” Kurt said.
“Sure, you won’t get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play around with hardware. And convincing the people who already know why WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers who’ve never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their walls.”
“Right,” Kurt said, getting more excited. “Right! I mean, it’s just ego, right? Why do we need to control the network?” He spun around on his cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. “Gimme some apple pie, please,” he said. “This is the best part: it’s going to violate the hell out of everyone’s contracts with their ISPs—they sell you an all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they’ll cut off your service if you’re too hungry. Well, fuck that! It’s not just community networking, it’ll be civil disobedience against shitty service-provider terms of service!”
There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up from their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them and waved. “Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that’s so good, you can’t help but do a little dance?”
One of the hard-hats smiled. “Yeah, but his wife always turns me down.” He socked the other hard-hat in the shoulder.
The other hard-hat grunted into his coffee. “Nice. Very nice. You’re gonna be a lot of fun today, I can tell.”
They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt’s Buick.
“Hang on,” Alan said. “Let’s have a walk, okay?” The city smelled like morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury’s factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds, clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. It invigorated him, made him feel part of something huge and all-encompassing, like being in his father the mountain.
“Up there,” Kurt said, pointing to a little playground atop the hill that rose sharply up Dupont toward Christie, where a herd of plastic rocking horses swayed creakily in the breeze.